Dollar and time entities now recognized

The search engine has been upgraded to recognize two more entities, dollar amounts and times of day. Previously the engine recognized postal addresses, email addresses, zip codes, and phone numbers.

An entity stands for a class of items. When an entity is recognized, the search engine can match a query to any member of the class instead of just a keyword. For example, the query "license cost" matches documents that have the word "license" near a dollar amount (in addition to documents containing the word "license" near the word "cost". Similarly, a query "when does the store open" will match documents containing the words "store" and "open" near a time of day.

Interview with Blossom Founder

One of Blossom's founders, Alan Feuer, was interviewed recently by Steve Arnold, a well-respected technology analyst who specializes in search. The interview gives some insight into the philosophy underlying Blossom search. You can read the interview at ArnoldIT. Steve also authors a blog where he writes cogently about search technology and companies.

Search engine enhancements

In the latest enhancement of the search engine, a few changes were made in the appearance of the output:

• An ordering option has been added allowing a searcher to sort by relevance or date.
• Pagination has been turned on by default, so the "more" option is no longer needed.
• The heading that tells which documents are being shown has been simplified for long result lists.

In addition, the entity extraction feature has been extended to include postal addresses in addition to phone numbers and email addresses.

Entity Search

We have begun adding an exciting new feature to the search engine called entity search. An entity is something like a phone number or an email address that can be recognized by its format and context. During indexing, the search engine now recognizes a variety of entities.

At query time the search engine looks for certain keywords in the query. If they are present it performs an entity search in addition to a regular keyword search. For example, in a search for "main office phone number", in addition to looking for pages that contain all of the query words, it will also look for pages that contain "main office" near a phone-number entity. As a result, it will find pages where there is a phone number, but not necessarily the phrase "phone number".

Over the next few months we will be adding support for new entities such as dates, times, and zip codes. We welcome your suggestions for other entities to add.

New pricing, Lower cost

We are happy to report that 2007 was a banner year for Blossom. With increased revenue and lower server costs, we are able to increase page limits to lower your costs.

Pricing for Site Search has been simplified and lowered: $10 for the first $1000 pages plus $5 for each additional 750 pages.

Page limits for Affinity Search and Enterprise Search have been raised. Affinity Search now costs $100 for the first 20,000 pages plus $5 for each additional 3,000 pages. Enterprise Search costs $200 for the first 80,000 pages plus $5 for each additional 5,000 pages. Both Affinity and Enterprise Search come with a free monthly link audit.

These new rates will be effective on your next invoice.

Improve Your Search!

We recently completed a review of how our clients are using the features of the Blossom search service. To our surprise, many sites use very little of the search engine's capabilities. So, we have created a new program called "Improve your search!" where a Blossom engineer makes suggestions to improve the search experience on your website.

The suggestions are available through the "Summary" tab of your Search Activity report. You can also get them by logging on to www.blossom.com and following the link "Retrieve suggestions for an index".

Slider to Sort by Relevance versus Date

We invite you to test and comment on a new feature of the search output, a slider bar that allows searchers to change the importance of age and relevance in ordering search results. To try it out, add "/slider" to the ACTION URL in your search form.

Moving the slider changes the relative importance of document age and relevance. For example, consider searching for a press release about "fireworks". A search based just on relevance might pull up old press releases that contain a lot about fireworks before a recent release that just mentions fireworks. A search just based on document age might pull up recent press releases having little to do with fireworks before a slightly older release with more about fireworks. Adjusting the slider to get a mixture of age and relevance allows a searcher to control how important age is versus relevance.

Try it out and let us know what you think.